Twin Lakes provides this Policy to inform its customers of its network management practices. Information about Twin Lakes’ other policies and practices are available at www.twinlakes.net.
Twin Lakes manages its network to ensure that all of its customers experience a safe and secure broadband Internet environment that is fast, reliable and affordable. Twin Lakes wants its customers to indulge in all that the Internet has to offer, whether it is social networking, streaming videos and music, to communicating through email and videoconferencing.
Twin Lakes manages its network for a number of reasons, including optimizing its network, managing network congestion and managing security protocols. Very few of Twin Lakes’ customers are impacted by the protocols and practices that Twin Lakes uses to manage its network.
Twin Lakes has components on its network backbone that are shared between customers. Because of this, demand on the network rises and falls and is in constant fluctuation. Thus, when a relatively small number of customers using Twin Lakes’ network are using a disproportionate amount of network bandwidth at any given time, this may contribute to network congestion that degrades other customers’ broadband Internet experience. Twin Lakes network management practices aim to minimize the occurrence of this network congestion by ensuring that each customer has access to a fair share of that bandwidth.
1. Performance Characteristics
The Twin Lakes network is a Fiber network that utilizes Ethernet technology to deliver fast, secure and reliable Internet service to the customer. Rates, terms and conditions of the Broadband Internet service are located on the Twin Lakes Website.
2. Network Management Practices
Twin Lakes uses various tools and industry standard techniques to manage its network and deliver fast, secure and reliable Internet service. Such management tools and practices include the following:
1. Managing Congestion
Twin Lakes’ network is designed to restrict congestion. Recently, Twin Lakes increased the capacity of its network by deploying Fiber-to-the-Curb and Fiber-to-the-Home infrastructure in order to accommodate increasing bandwidth demands. With a lot more capacity, congestion has been marginalized. But, Twin Lakes does not assume that its network is immune to congestion. The company monitors its network twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week and is notified whenever its network capacity reaches 80% utilization.
Any time an area of the network nears a state of congestion, Twin Lakes will take measures to identify the cause of the congestion. Such measures will include monitoring and identifying contributing attributes such as spam, virus distribution, or the presence of malicious Internet traffic, codes or content.
In addition, Customers using an excessive amount of bandwidth or conduct that abuses or threatens the Twin Lakes network or which violates the company’s Acceptable Use Policy or Internet service Terms and Conditions will be asked to stop any such use immediately. A failure to respond or to cease any such conduct could result in service suspension or termination.
All customers will have access to all legal services, applications and content online. Most Internet activities will be unaffected. But some customers may experience longer download or upload times, or slower surf speeds on the web. Twin Lakes’ network congestion management is ‘application-agnostic’, based on current network conditions, and is not implemented on the basis of customers’ online activities, protocols or applications. Please note that Twin Lakes’ application of this network management practice does not relate to any particular customer’s aggregate monthly data usage.
2. Network Security
Twin Lakes knows the importance of securing its network and customers from network threats and annoyances. The company secures patrons of its network via SSS authentication, which verifies each customer accessing the network. Twin Lakes also deploys spam filters in order to divert spam from an online customers email inbox while allowing the customer to control which emails are identified as spam.
As its normal practice, Twin Lakes does not block any protocols, content or traffic for purposes of network management except that the company may block or limit such traffic as spam, viruses, malware, or denial of service attacks to protect network integrity and the security of our customers.
3. Technology
Twin Lakes’ network management employs a variety of industry-standard tools, applications and devices to monitor, secure and maintain its network.
4. Monitoring Schedule & Network Performance
Twin Lakes uses network management software to conduct periodic monitoring of the network in order to detect abnormal traffic flows, congestion, network security breaches, malware, loss, and damage to the network. The company uses monitoring to identify interface utilization and bottlenecking.
Twin Lakes takes measurements of various metrics for network performance, analysis of the measurements to determine normal levels, and determination of appropriate threshold values to ensure required level of performance for each service. Twin Lakes uses such metrics as network throughput, user response times and line utilization and monitors the values of these metrics to determine the overall performance of the network.
